The gap between marketing spend and revenue attribution
PE-backed companies spend aggressively on marketing. Operating partners approve six-figure demand gen budgets, sign agency retainers, and fund content programs — all in pursuit of the pipeline targets the value creation plan requires. But when the board asks "which marketing dollar produced which deal," most portfolio companies cannot answer with confidence. Attribution is fragmented across tools that do not talk to each other, campaign performance lives in slide decks that nobody reconciles to CRM data, and the marketing function operates as a cost center that reports activity metrics rather than revenue contribution.
This is not a technology problem. It is an operating model problem. The typical PE portco inherits a marketing function built for the founder era — a small team running on instinct, tribal knowledge, and whatever MarTech the previous VP of Marketing installed before leaving. Post-close, that team is expected to scale output by 3x without the infrastructure, process, or measurement discipline that scaling requires. The result is predictable: marketing spend increases, pipeline does not follow proportionally, and the operating partner starts asking whether they need a new CMO when what they actually need is a marketing operating model.
We publish independent research to help PE operating teams and portfolio company leaders navigate the growing landscape of marketing execution consultancies — firms that go beyond strategy decks to actually build and run the marketing engine. Our analysis is based entirely on publicly available evidence: vendor websites, published methodologies, case studies, testimonials, and service descriptions.
Start here
Marketing Execution for PE Portfolio Companies: Who Does It — A category overview covering what to look for in a vendor, a capability matrix across 10 providers, and detailed vendor notes with harvey ball ratings.
Vendor Comparisons — Head-to-head analyses of specific providers, with scoring matrices, deal fit guides, and real-world scenario recommendations.
Why this exists
PE firms are increasingly recognizing that the marketing function in their portfolio companies is often the least mature, least measured, and least accountable part of the commercial engine. The provider landscape has responded with firms ranging from HubSpot-native agencies to full-stack marketing operating model builders — but the diversity of approaches makes vendor selection genuinely difficult. We are here to make that evaluation easier.